Having been inc=volved in a few Zoom meetings I realied the mic on my Dell Laptop is not great. (It is under the front edge which may not be the best place.)
Looking at add-on options, There are those with a 3.5mm jack and there are those with a USB plug.
What are the pros and cons? Please.
The ones with a 3.5mm jack are usually cheaper because the USB ones have extra electronics in them. There are two common variants of the 3.5mm jack. Some headsets have a separate jack for microphone and speakers while others combine both into a single jack with an extra contact. Get what matches your computer. If you don't have a headset socket on your computer buy a USB one instead. I like the Sennheiser headsets, but there are lots out there to choose from.
John
3.5mm jack requires a sound card so equipped. Many laptops dont have one
Don't think I've ever seen a laptop without 3.5mm jack, often it's a combined headset jack, rather than individual speaker & mic jacks.
Even this slim laptop which has ditched as many connectors as possible, has nothing but two USB-C sockets and ... a 3.5mm jack.
A decent headset is the best option. Getting the mic close to the voice helps minimise room acoustics and background sounds. But like all such things, they vary in quality. On Zoom settings, you can do a trial recording to assess what your mic sounds like.
Since Zoom has built in latency. I doubt USB or analogue would make any real difference. The headset I have is USB, and works just fine.
What decade are you in?
Unfortunately it looks as if this is out of stock on Amazon, but this microphone is superb.....I bought two.....
It does require the functionality of a sound card in terms of analogue ins and outs, even though it may be a nondescript corner of the motherboard physically.
And even Apple have kept 3.5mm combined sockets on their Macbooks
Of course the laptop has a sound card.
It's an HDAudio chip (48 pins standard footprint normally), but with only stereo headphone and stereo microphone as ports.
You can have sound and it can be via a standard means and tied to a standard bus (the HDAudio digital bus).
The jacks in HDAudio, also have microphone bias, but the voltage offered varies a bit, and isn't always enough for perfect operation. The bias values aren't canonical values either. While you might hope 3.3V and 5V are choices, there can be other waypoints between those (like say 4V).
This is what the bias (through a 2K or so resistor) is for. The power supplied is not "hard power", so the proposal is, it would not hurt a dynamic microphone, if a dynamic mic was plugged in.
One other slight slight difference, is the HDAudio chip runs from a "private regulator". There is usually a small
7805 to power the HDAudio, and that's termed "clean power". It isn't really all that clean, but it's an attempt at least. Whereas USB as a power source, comes from +5VSB and is dirty digital power. If the noise floor on your USB happened to not be very good, that's a possible reason.The absolute best microphones, are the ones with their own amplifier chip inside. Because the amplifier chip runs of exactly 5V, there's a tendency for users to "feed them better", and in return, they work at the levels you expect (line level). You get a 1V signal, with the microphone three feet from you. Then, only the echo suppressor in Windows, can squash that nice signal and make shit out of it. The various echo suppressors being the wild card in Zoom/Windows that affects the outcome of what you're trying to do.
I only have one mic that's worth a darn, and it has TRRS, and one of the contacts is for hard +5V. And that's what I use for video conferences. I run the mic from a 5V wall adapter, and have a TRS wired from it to the computer. I have other microphones that are simply horrible. And suggest that maybe the VBias isn't strong enough for them. If you check an electronics catalog, you'll find electrets with all sorts of different intended operating voltages.
*******The other whizzy microphone today is the D-MIC or digital microphone. These use MEMS.
While D-MIC got a lot of "air play" and promotion, I've not run into any questions about it.
Paul
If you have a Bluetooth headset for your mobile that will often work well with a laptop. If it doesn't have Bluetooth then there are small dongles you can get[1]
[1] take care in the placement of the dongle. On a desktop I put mine next to a WiFi dongle and got download speeds slower than my upload speed.
Even if the mic is relatively decent, they can pick up lots of room noise since they can't noise cancel like a headset one can.
3.5mm jack relies on the internal sound card's audio paths - so you have one sound device on the computer, and the machine can choose whether the audio goes out to the headset or the internal speakers. This generally makes it easy to get the right device talking to zoom or whatever. Things to check: some headsets (typically designed for use on mobile phones) have 4 pole jack plugs that carry left and right audio and mic all on the same plug. Not all laptops will support that type - some will expect the mic to be on a separate jack plug.The USB option solves the compatibility problem generally - but adds another complete audio device to the computer. So you may find you need to manually switch between them to get the computer using the right device for handling sound. (if you have a monitor connected via HDMI, and it has speakers, then that will also add yet another audio device)
The next option to look at is bluetooth. Again headsets are available with this, and some laptops have it as standard. On others you can add it with a USB bluetooth device. Bluetooth gives you wireless connectionm to the headset (which is powered by its internal rechargeable battery). Again there can be a bit of extra complexity there since some (of the better) headphones will present the option of two types of BT device - one for high quality audio output only, and one for "headset" use with mic and lower quality audio for telephone style use.
Lastly you get the "pro" level headsets that support multiple interfaces like the plantonics Savi range. The top end ones support landline phone connections, bluetooth mobile connections, and USB computer connections to the headset base unit, and then a long range DECT link between the base unit and the headset. Hence you can use one headset for everything comms related (they are not designed for music listening).
My personal preference is for something wireless in this application - although it probably matters less with a laptop that you can also pick up and carry with you.
I'm in the never be an early adopter decade...tee hee
I also find cheap ones can be very insensitive.
Having done lots of Zoom meeting with often the same people, you should note that Zoom itself can make a mess of your sound. Judging by listening to others using the same equipment on all Zoom meetings. Just the same as with mobile phones. Sometimes you get a pretty good 'line' - often a dreadful one.
At the start of Covid, I decided to set up a 'state of the art' Zoom room. A desktop PC feeding my TV and sound system for incoming vision and audio.
A decent web cam on a tripod. Reasonable lighting.
For outgoing audio, a broadcast quality condenser mic fed into a mic amp, them parametric equaliser, and then into the high quality sound card.
Listened to the output using the Zoom test facility and set the EQ and levels for best results.
Recorded a meeting and listened back. Just the normal not brilliant Zoom sound quality.
Whenever I use Zoom on my laptop, I use a bluetooth headset with built-in microphone. That works very well - as long as I remember to disable the laptop's own mic!
As long, of course, as you can get drivers for your operating system.
Owain
I find Windows 10 seems to support most USB devices with few exceptions.
USB are in effect a separate bit of hardware and this is not using the internal sound card at all, and the ordinary 3.5mm plug is analogue and uses the sound card. Might be moor trouble to use two sound devices one in and one out, not tried it in Zoom. However the best bet is a relatively cheap tie clip mike that one can plug into the mic socket but you will need to be sure you can adjust the level, as many laptops seem a bit deaf, but normally there is a hidden booster option on the mic input somewhere in the sound card software. Of course feedback can be an issue so some experimentation might be a good idea to stop that horrible ducking that occurs when its closte to feedback, you might in that case use some in ear phones to listen, but beware bluetooth as the latency can be extremely annoying. Brian
I've never come across a laptop with no sound hardware. I do hate the latest realtek as it can turn it off in quiet times meaning the first synable of anything anyone says gets clipped off. There used to be a program called silencio to stopthis but not sure how well it lives with zoom etc. Brian
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